A New Path
Are you feeling it?
I am.
Everybody’s talking about it
(at least you think they are but you haven’t really talked to anybody deeply in months. Maybe years).
Everybody’s ready
(but nobody seems willing to actually jump to that next stone. Are they frozen by fear or in time?).
Everybody needs it
(but few will actually admit it).
If you’re honest you’ve felt a lot or a little off since:
The pandemic
The last election
The one before that
Buying your smartphone (c’mon you even remember the day)
Your divorce
Your wedding
Your dad’s death
Your mom’s death
Your kid’s death
You moved out of California / NY / Portland
Your friends moved out of California/ NY / Portland
You stopped driving
You got your car fixed
You found the right meds
You got off meds
You stopped drinking
You started feeling it was ok to have a drink
You left church
You returned to church
I feel like I just channeled George Carlin for five minutes.
How many did you check off?
I got four.
Maybe five.
Id like to offer a qualifier since the above rant-lite might describe a person who could be categorized as depressed.
I am not.
In fact I’m doing great.
At least on paper.
I’m helping an elderly parent have a better life — ie. community, connection, laughter, new experiences - than she’s had in maybe 30 years.
And it’s more rewarding - far more in fact than I had planned for.
Financially I’m better off than I’ve ever been.
As far as goals I’ve achieved many - albeit in smaller ways than planned but achieved nonetheless. Making four movies and two really good ones, writing a book about one of them, relaunching a BMX bike company, taking many many road trips in an old convertible, a few travels internationally, and adding in friendships of 30-40 years and I feel incredibly rich if I’m honest.
If experiences were dollars I’d put myself at a comfortable seven or
even low eight figure life so far.
I still haven’t met the woman I thought I’d find - or better said the timing has never lined up - but I’m not bitter and have cultivated solid uncle status with friends’ kids and cousins all over the country.
I’m a truck guy now and I love it.
I do miss my old car (who wouldn’t) but my truck fits and it does everything.
And I love that it’s still registered in TN so California gets a little less $ to mismanage.
Despite all these positives, and pretty damn good health for 53, something’s still not quite right.
And yes I’m aware of the cycles of history and I yes I know the Fourth Turning — fortunately found it just before the pandemic — but this feeling started before.
Bowling
I recently started digging into Bowling Alone, the apparently hugely influential sociological book I somehow missed for the last 30 years.
Probably I was too busy not bowling alone.
I found the author on YouTube and excitedly began watching a recent revisit of his book and theory, retrospectively of course as he’s now an octogenarian, before he so disappointed me by the trendy and predictable blaming of a certain White House occupant, for Americans’ disconnected state.
I’m so tired of false blaming and victim-as-virtue I can’t even tell you.
And I didn’t even vote for the guy.
But the laziness and cop outs and groupthink and mob think and lemming herds and lemon curds, and tribal adherence at the cost of common sense and human understanding makes me almost physically sick.
I’m still ingesting Bowling Alone, I don’t think Putnam is particularly or intentionally divisive, I think he’s just reacting from his Boston perch, tribal waves of grain indeed.
I made
this meme recently, to mock a certain NYC congresswoman who claimed to have been from a tougher neighborhood than she’d actually grown up in.
She was gaslighting.
Ugh there’s another recent trend I would gladly toss into the abyss.
But I found myself forgetting all about the meme and the gaslighting and instead was transported back to that world when ‘Swingers’ - one of the great guy movies of the last 40 years - was released.
I was supposed to see Tom Petty in S.F. but hadn’t planned well and when a friend and I showed up at the famous Fillmore Club, there wasn’t even one scalped ticket to be found.
So we drove down to Van Ness, saw ‘Swingers’ on a theatre marquee, parked and went inside.
We loved it of course. And we had a whole new batch of lines we’d be repeating for years —
“You’re so money. You’re so money and you don’t even know it.” - Trent
It was 1997.
Maybe ‘96.
See I don’t even want to google it and check because who cares?
I mean really.
Maybe our quest to know everything has backfired, instead quashing mystery, curtailing curiosity, and killing beauty?
I used to recite poetry. I stole a girls’ heart once reciting Wordsworth over the loudspeaker at summer camp.
“I wandered lonely as a cloud, that floats on high o’er vales and hills.”
Hopefully you know the rest.
Slightly less tenuous than the scene from Life is Beautiful.
I memorized poetry because I saw Dead Poet’s Society and I wanted to be in Mr Keating’s class (what shy kid wouldn’t!), and also because when my grandmother died we got a poetry book of hers and I thought I should know at least a few by heart.
It’s good to speak the words of people who’ve already lived. Who’ve lost and longed. Who’ve wrestled with angels and lived to tell.
So ok.
Maybe in wanting to live too perfectly or without regret we’ve inadvertently settled for lives without mystery.
Safe.
Convenient.
Without risk.
After all how special would a wedding couple feel speaking their vows in front of God and these witnesses if they already knew exactly how the marriage would unfold?
Yawn.
They probably would slip out without the guests even noticing because without mystery you lose anticipation.
Remember anticipation?
Gosh how badly I miss anticipation.
Anticipating a concert I got great seats to, anticipating a date with that one girl, anticipating a movie release on a Friday night when the multiple friends’ cars would pull into the theater parking lot and we’d be laughing before we even sat down.
Hmm maybe that’s a harsh loss we’ve traded convenience and control for.
Anticipation, and therefore uncertainty and mystery.
When every life outcome is controlled and therefore known, why even suggest trying anything new or unproven?
Why do anything?
But I’m not a nihilist.
Life is too precious and my faith thankfully doesn’t let me go too far down that road.
I’m also not a Luddite, at least not a severe one.
I’m also not stuck in the 80’s, 90’s, or anywhere really.
I prefer new beginnings, fresh starts, breaking habits, and knowing when to fish or cut bait.
And having the courage to act.
And I know I’m not alone in this feeling that a new path is needed.
I’ve been listening and watching.
And if we all want, one could avoid these deep ponderings altogether.
There’s new shows to binge, overpriced concerts to attend, new restaurants to try, bitcoin to purchase (and sell), and plenty of doom scrolling if that’s what we let our lives become.
<pause> for tea at 4am and a quick trip outside to relieve myself and look at the stars — Greg Brown would approve:
“walked out at night, to take a leak -
underneath the stars, oh yeah that’s the life for me.
Orion and the Pleiades, and I guess that must be mars,
all as clear as we long to be.”
Appropriately that’s from The Poet Game - song and album of same.
Look
I’d love to help if I knew what to do.
In fact I’d quit my job tomorrow if I could make a living helping us get our groove back.
Two family members
who shall go unnamed are just coming to the end of an almost 10 year grudge, and I had a part in instigating the reconnection.
Mom was checking out of state family postings on a certain social site and saw the two in a picture together.
Her heart stopped and she checked the date. It was last week!
She said a prayer of thanks and messaged me while at work.
I drove home with no music or noise - I just enjoyed the thought of two my family members back together.
Reconciliation.
A breaking of chains.
Healing.
Like I said
l’m ok. I’m glad family is my focus.
That my friend circle is smaller is probably natural.
Breakthroughs and life moments are all around — if we’re paying attention.
I’m confident there’s more music to make, more paintings to paint, more flowers to pick, more road trips to take, and more poetry to recite.
I’m here and I’m not giving up.
I’m also not giving in to the division too many are hell bent on pushing.
But I’m eyes wide for the new path.
Does the new path involve bowling leagues?
A return to flip phones?
Possibly.
But I’d like to go even further back (shocking I know), and start with names.
A good path needs a good name.
After all it’s far easier to find the path when you know what it’s called.
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